Suggestions for Cronin's Dictionary

[Johnny Triangles]

I think this would be a good opportunity to suggest phenomenons that should make it into Cronin's Dictionary of Writing. Here's one:

False Epiphany Characters - There are characters that writers have become obsessed with writing the ultimate be-all, end-all story for. Writers are so attracted with writing breakthrough stories for these characters that they regularly negate the previous writer's breakthrough for the same character and simply hit the reset button. After seeing how Miller was able to make a legend out of himself by writing the breakthrough maturation of a B-level character like Daredevil or how Morrison made his mark with Animal Man and Doom Patrol, a lot of writers want to do breakthrough stories of their own with well-known, B-level characters in hopes of making legends of themselves also. It's harder to do a breakthrough with Batman and Spider-Man because they have had so many classic runs, but lower-tier characters give a better chance at this. For some reason, certain characters attract this phenomenon more than others:

Iceman - many writers over the years, writers keep fixating on showing that Bobby is an insecure slacker who has not been using his powers for their full potential for the longest time...until now. He will now be more mature AND realize the full extent of his powers. Lobdell, Nicieza, Austen and whoever was writing him during Zero Tolerance and more that I probably missed have all had Bobby become more mature and realize his powers' full extent...until the next writer comes along and starts it all over again.

Nightwing - I have lost count of the amount of times a storyline has promised to take Nightwing "out of the shadow of the bat." Seriously, just retire that phrase already. Wolfman defined the template of post-80s Dick Grayson for all time: Can never win fights unless against henchmen, wallows in his inadequacies and daddy issues, cries a lot especially when mind control villains make him hallucinate about his daddy Batman hating him. Then we have Judas Contract, where he supposedly becomes his own man. He does this by getting tossed around and running away from Deathstroke and putting on a new costume and making grand speeches about getting out of the shadow of the bat. Right after he gets out of the shadow of the bat, he's right back to losing fights and crying over how Batman didn't love him during the Trigon storyline. Since then, we've seen him step out of Batman's shadow and "come into his own" over and over again, and a recent Devin Grayson/Phil Hester issue even had the term "out of the shadow of the bat" appear on the cover...face it, HE'S NEVER GOING TO BREAK THAT ROLE! Astonishing are the New Teen Titans apologists that keep citing that book as the one that made Nightwing into a confident independent solo hero all his own. Have they read the past 27 years of Dick Grayson appearances?

Roy Harper - Meltzer once again has shown how Roy has put the shadows of his past behind him and has graduated to the big leagues and has confidence to show for it. After Devin's miniseries did the same before that. As well as his stint as Titans leader under Wolfman's final issues did before that. Yet we see Karate Kid mocking him as a loser again in Countdown. Nothing will change.

Anyone have any others?

[Johnny Triangles]

Another phenomenon I think should be immortalized is:

Stalker Note Story - Like real stalker notes, these are misguided and intense scribblings intended to come off as love letters, but actually come off as misguided, creepy and intense to everyone else. For example, New Fronteir is a love letter to the characters. Meltzer's Justice League is a stalker note. Elements of real stalkers are (1) pursue their victims in order to reverse, correct, or avenge a rejection (e.g. divorce, separation, termination). (stalker note writer's version: pointlessly retcon a development that personally offends you simply because you think it interfere's with your "pure" version of the character), (2) seeking to establish an intimate, loving relationship with their victim. To them, the victim is a long sought-after soul mate, and they were meant to be together. (stalker note writer version: the overly familiar way Meltzer has characters interact with each other, have tea time, keep using first names all the time "Bruce," "Clark" "Ollie," constantly reminesce together)

Other real-life stalker types below (I'll leave it to you to figure out how the stalker note writer exhibits such behaviors in a story):
Eroto-manic stalker: This stalker believes that the victim is in love with them. The erotomaniac reinterprets what their victim says and does to support the delusion, and is convinced that the imagined romance will eventually become a permanent union. They often target a celebrity or a person of a higher social status (though it is important to note, not all celebrity stalkers are erotomaniacs).
Incompetent suitor: despite poor social/courting skills, possess a sense of entitlement to an intimate relationship with those who have attracted their amorous interest.
Predatory stalker: spy on the victim in to prepare and plan an attack - usually sexual - on the victim.

[Sophisticated_Gamer]

Superman- supposedly one of the most powerfull character in DC, but acts like a panzy.

[Omar Karindu]

I generally look for "neutral" stuff to gloss, that is, things that have been done both well and badly. To that end...

Cape Inescapability -- The tendency of the creators of non-superhero comics who ostensibly have no desire to do superheroes or don't "get" them to either end up doing them, or end up devoting at least a bit of space somewhere to analyzing or repudiating them. This likely occurs because of their market dominance and persistent tendency to remain synonymous with American comics as a medium in common parlance. Good examples include the ray-gun issue of Daniel Clowes's <I>Eightball</I> and Chris Ware's "Super-Man" satires. A negative example might be Garth Ennis's various works regarding his hatred of superheroes, which generally end up depending very heavily on the persistence and even the minutiae of superheroes in order to work.

Traumotivation -- In superhero comics especially, character motivation is always the result of physical or psychological trauma rather than (the much, much harder to depict) extended developmental motivation. Traumotivation is not simply a motivating moment in the origin, or a violent source of powers like the Hulk's gamma-bomb exposure. Its power is to combine motivation and the traumatic experience so well that the traumatic event is inseperable from any general concept and personality of the character. Examples include Batman losing his parents, Two-Face's and Dr. Doom's face-scarring accidents, the Thing's mutation, and Wolverine's victimization by Weapon X, the Punisher's origin, and so on. Perhaps the most tasteless example is Red Sonja's rape (and, for the disturbing part, her rape-reenactment fantasy, which is generally presented as a good idea.) Counterexamples might be Iron Man, who is no longer centrally motivated by his original wounding, and most incarnations of Superman, where the death of Krypton is not a defining experience that explains Superman's heroism.

Pressurized Inspiration -- The way that outside pressures often forces or innovation or originality of approach upon comics creators, especially in eras past. The canonical example is Will Eisner's Spirit, where Eisner's limited space, rapid deadlines, and storytelling ambition somtimes inspired the formal play and experimentation. (He has said repeatedly, for example, that many of the noirish lighting effects and so on were actually just ways of producing comprehensible visuals and saving time by drawing less.) A more subdued and less visually-oriented example might be the way Marvel's refusal to let John Byrne call Northstar gay inspired a subtle and intelligent communication of the idea without using the word itself.

Outliving the Influence -- This occurs when a character, book, or concept is quite clearly a pastiche -- often a thin one -- of a readily identifiable, singular source; against all odds, the pastiche (or perhaps mere ripoff) outlasts and surpasses the original in popularity or vibrancy. The Punisher, a very close version of Don Pendleton's Mack Bolan character, might be an archetypal example of this: more people know the Punisher than know of Bolan. Similarly, the Fatal Five and the later Suicide Squad at DC are versions of the Deadly Dozen that still turn up, even as the original movie recedes into history. Perhaps the best example is the degree to which the Green Lantern Corps has utterly eclipsed E.E. "Doc" Smith's <I>Lensmen</I> in pop-cultural terms. This term should be reserved in its use for very specific Whether this is a test of talent or perhaps of the short-term memory could influence its application. (We might want to say, for example, that Matt Fraction's Casanova will outlive its influences.) It is also, of course, clearly not limited to comics.

Missed Continuity -- This occurs when a later creator misses the original creator's intent or doesn't know their endpoint, and thereby goes somewhere very, very different. The altered version, based on a mistake or upon ignorance, then sticks. The examples that most readily jump to mind are almost all negative, such as Bill Mantlo's utterly missing that John Byrne's Puck in Alpha Flight was meant to be a sufferer of androchroplasty. Mantlo instead assumed that Puck's mysterious past had to be tied to his painful condition, and thus we got the weird story that his body contained an evil sorcerer who shrunk him or somesuch. However, this is because, when it works out, we don't much notice or accept the mistake as an improvement. As an example, Peter Milligan's "Victorian genetecist" origin for Mister Sinister works better in the X-books than Claremont's original "evil child's projection" concept. In general, this should be applied more to mistaken interpretations or to writers acting in genuine ignorance of the original creator's intention (as happened with Marvel villains Scorpio and the Hobgoblin.)

[Omar Karindu]

Grace Notes -- Plot points that exist as homages, references, and reenactments of past stories of a character or title that have become iconic for that character or title. When Jean Grey goes Phoenix again, that's a Grace Note; when Bullseye or the Green Goblin threaten the hero's girlfriend, that's a Grace Note; when Batman winds up facing Ra's Al Ghul in a swordfight in the desert, that's a Grace Note. When Green Lantern teams with Green Arrow for an issue or two, that's a Grace Note.

The difference between a Grace Note and a mere homage is that a Grace Note is a plot point; and homage can be a deliberate coincidence of image or a reenactment sequence with no major bearing on the plot.

Used well, it can play as a variation on a governing theme or a classic, as when Brian Bendis had the Kingpin return to take over the New York mobs, only to twist it from Miller's version of that story idea by having Daredevil simply get pissed off and beat the fat man to pulp. Another might be the neat reversal of the classic Green Lantern/Flash team-up formula in Mark Waid's "The Return of Barry Allen" plotline. At a certain level, the entire post-Crisis rivalry between Superman and Batman was a Grace Note in a different key, referring ironically or inversely to their decades-long teaming as the World's Finest Duo before.

More popularly, Kurt Busiek in certain sense builds some of the background material of Astro City from Grace Notes, albeit Grace Notes from superhero source material rather than from his own characters' (pastiched) histories. Planetary/Batman might well be a masterclass in the use of Grace Notes.

Used badly, Grcae Notes produce what Brian has already called Karaoke Comics, or when really abused, pure kitsch.

Jeph Loeb's work is, to my mind, a prime example of the abuse of Grace Notes. Hush, Supergirl, and Superman/Batman were structured around Grace Notes. In Hush, one issue might give the fans the comforting spectacle of Superman facing Batman; the next would tap Neal Adams's iconography by giving Batman his de rigeur swordfight and cryptic verbal joust with Ra's al Ghul; yet another would play out the ingrained spectacle of Batman "almost killing" the Joker in rage about the death of some cast member or other. All of these are remixes, or, more accurately, representations of stories past, stories of great impact. Put together, they create the illusion by way of allusion that Hush is also of great impact.

Because it was once important that Superman and Batman threw down, or that the Joker's murder of a "name" character nearly provoked Batman to kill, because an entire era of Superman stories can be signified by Luthor's green armor, and because both the casual and the dedicated fans -- and, one has to say, a subset of analytically-minded superhero fans -- immediately detect the "aura" of importance surrounding these moments, Loeb's stories tend to be treated as importnat for including the set of referents that carry with them that significance.

It's a bit beyond nostalgia, of course, because nostalgia in its truer form wouldn't abide a story that hits Miller's DKR and Bill Finger's 1950s mystery stories one after the other, all in the key of the Image 90s courtesy of Jim Lee's art. What happens instead is that "importance" becomes a selling point while the very specific reasons for the original, actual importance of the stories being referred to are subsumed by the sheer quantity of Grace Notes.

[Johnny Triangles]

Originally Posted by Omar Karindu

Grace Notes -- Plot points that exist as homages, references, and reenactments of past stories of a character or title that have become iconic for that character or title. When Jean Grey goes Phoenix again, that's a Grace Note; when Bullseye or the Green Goblin threaten the hero's girlfriend, that's a Grace Note; when Batman winds up facing Ra's Al Ghul in a swordfight in the desert, that's a Grace Note. When Green Lantern teams with Green Arrow for an issue or two, that's a Grace Note.

The difference between a Grace Note and a mere homage is that a Grace Note is a plot point; and homage can be a deliberate coincidence of image or a reenactment sequence with no major bearing on the plot.

Used well, it can play as a variation on a governing theme or a classic, as when Brian Bendis had the Kingpin return to take over the New York mobs, only to twist it from Miller's version of that story idea by having Daredevil simply get pissed off and beat the fat man to pulp. Another might be the neat reversal of the classic Green Lantern/Flash team-up formula in Mark Waid's "The Return of Barry Allen" plotline. At a certain level, the entire post-Crisis rivalry between Superman and Batman was a Grace Note in a different key, referring ironically or inversely to their decades-long teaming as the World's Finest Duo before.

More popularly, Kurt Busiek in certain sense builds some of the background material of Astro City from Grace Notes, albeit Grace Notes from superhero source material rather than from his own characters' (pastiched) histories. Planetary/Batman might well be a masterclass in the use of Grace Notes.

Used badly, Grcae Notes produce what Brian has already called Karaoke Comics, or when really abused, pure kitsch.

Jeph Loeb's work is, to my mind, a prime example of the abuse of Grace Notes. Hush, Supergirl, and Superman/Batman were structured around Grace Notes. In Hush, one issue might give the fans the comforting spectacle of Superman facing Batman; the next would tap Neal Adams's iconography by giving Batman his de rigeur swordfight and cryptic verbal joust with Ra's al Ghul; yet another would play out the ingrained spectacle of Batman "almost killing" the Joker in rage about the death of some cast member or other. All of these are remixes, or, more accurately, representations of stories past, stories of great impact. Put together, they create the illusion by way of allusion that Hush is also of great impact.

Because it was once important that Superman and Batman threw down, or that the Joker's murder of a "name" character nearly provoked Batman to kill, because an entire era of Superman stories can be signified by Luthor's green armor, and because both the casual and the dedicated fans -- and, one has to say, a subset of analytically-minded superhero fans -- immediately detect the "aura" of importance surrounding these moments, Loeb's stories tend to be treated as importnat for including the set of referents that carry with them that significance.

It's a bit beyond nostalgia, of course, because nostalgia in its truer form wouldn't abide a story that hits Miller's DKR and Bill Finger's 1950s mystery stories one after the other, all in the key of the Image 90s courtesy of Jim Lee's art. What happens instead is that "importance" becomes a selling point while the very specific reasons for the original, actual importance of the stories being referred to are subsumed by the sheer quantity of Grace Notes.

Great analysis all around.

[Sean Whitmore]

How about proxy writing? When a writer speaks directly to the reader through dialog between his characters.

An example might include Ron Marz's final issue of Green Lantern, where he says goodbye to his fans via Kyle saying goodbye to someone.

Or Steve Englehart's final Fantastic Four, (thanks to Brian's Urban Legend for that one), which is basically an issue-long dig at the direction editorial was taking the book in.

You can probably count Cable and Deadpool #40 as well, where Cable's monologue about fate not letting him escape his destiny reads like Nicieza grousing that Marvel won't let the character change,


SEAN

[Johnny Triangles]

Originally Posted by Sean Whitmore

How about proxy writing? When a writer speaks directly to the reader through dialog between his characters.

An example might include Ron Marz's final issue of Green Lantern, where he says goodbye to his fans via Kyle saying goodbye to someone.

Or Steve Englehart's final Fantastic Four, (thanks to Brian's Urban Legend for that one), which is basically an issue-long dig at the direction editorial was taking the book in.

You can probably count Cable and Deadpool #40 as well, where Cable's monologue about fate not letting him escape his destiny reads like Nicieza grousing that Marvel won't let the character change,


SEAN

You know, when I think about it, you nailed why I hate Morrison's mainstream DCU stuff lately. A LOT of it is proxy writing. He can hardly write anything without going meta and reflective on the evolution and current state of comics via proxy writing. Like that Joker story where he basically gave a dull in-story dissertation explaining why the Joker has had so many different personalities over the year. Or his first issue of his current run where he had Alfred and Brice have conversations that was just thinly veiled proxy writing on how Morrison felt that Bruce Wayne has been ignored for far too long and how he needs to be focused on. He could have done what Dini did, which was just to focus on Bruce Wayne without making his personal views on the characterization an explicit part of the story, bu Morrison just can't seem to write without making himself and his views the star of the story through proxy writing.

[Tony Bang]

Originally Posted by Johnny Triangles

You know, when I think about it, you nailed why I hate Morrison's mainstream DCU stuff lately. A LOT of it is proxy writing. He can hardly write anything without going meta and reflective on the evolution and current state of comics via proxy writing. Like that Joker story where he basically gave a dull in-story dissertation explaining why the Joker has had so many different personalities over the year. Or his first issue of his current run where he had Alfred and Brice have conversations that was just thinly veiled proxy writing on how Morrison felt that Bruce Wayne has been ignored for far too long and how he needs to be focused on. He could have done what Dini did, which was just to focus on Bruce Wayne without making his personal views on the characterization an explicit part of the story, bu Morrison just can't seem to write without making himself and his views the star of the story through proxy writing.

So can we call Morrison's work Gonzo superheroes?

[Johnny Triangles]

I didn't understand what "gonzo superheroes" meant, but after looking up the term "gonzo" online, I think you nailed it!! I think "Gonzo superheroes" is more in line with what Morrison does than proxy writing.

[suedenim]

I like the "Grace Notes" analysis, and it especially zeroes in on why I have a love/hate relationship with Jeph Loeb's writing. The grace notes provoke a pleasant reaction of recognition, but their overuse and poor integration with anything else provoke irritation.

A great example of a "False Epiphany Character" from another medium is Dr. John Carter from the TV show ER. There was a great line in a brief one-paragraph recap of an episode on televisionwithoutpity.com, that went something like "And Dr. Carter Comes of Age (yes, again)."

[Johnny Triangles]

The Grace Notes analysis nails why I have a hate/really hate relationship with Jeph Loeb's writing.

Another False Epiphany Character I found is Christian on Nip/Tuck. Granted I only saw the first half of the first season before I got tired of the outrageous "shock" antics, but in just those few episodes he had at least 3 instances where he'd come to some new plateau of maturity and emotional depth, only to become immediately shallow again in the next episode.

[Sean Whitmore]

Johnny Storm is as much a False Epiphany Character as Iceman. Dude's gotta be in his 40s by now, and not a year goes by that he doesn't grow up and leave his hotheaded immaturity behind.


SEAN

[BizarroBeachHead]

Originally Posted by Johnny Triangles

Iceman - many writers over the years, writers keep fixating on showing that Bobby is an insecure slacker who has not been using his powers for their full potential for the longest time...until now. He will now be more mature AND realize the full extent of his powers. Lobdell, Nicieza, Austen and whoever was writing him during Zero Tolerance and more that I probably missed have all had Bobby become more mature and realize his powers' full extent...until the next writer comes along and starts it all over again.

Mark my words, if I ever write X-Men, I will have Iceman spend 3 months "finding himself" in Amsterdam. Upon his return he would have a new relaxed outlook on life, realizing that he spent his entire life conflicting his desire to be fun and reckless and his need to grow up. Now he's just a hippy who's happy to be himself, go with the flow, and "chill."

Take THAT X-Men fans!

[Johnny Triangles]

Originally Posted by BizarroBeachHead

Mark my words, if I ever write X-Men, I will have Iceman spend 3 months "finding himself" in Amsterdam. Upon his return he would have a new relaxed outlook on life, realizing that he spent his entire life conflicting his desire to be fun and reckless and his need to grow up. Now he's just a hippy who's happy to be himself, go with the flow, and "chill."

Take THAT X-Men fans!

It wouldn't matter. The next writer would just decide that he wants to be the one who writes Iceman's defining breakout (or breakthrough) moment and immediately start ignoring everything you did with the character. And the cycle would just continue...